What Now?

by Low, Shari

  We’d been at Mammoth Mountain, a ski resort a few hours north of LA. The boys were in bed in the fancy two-bedroom suite, and Sam and I were drinking coffee at the dining table, a real wood fire crackling in the background.

  There’d been a tension between us for days, the heavy weight of a conversation that we’d been putting off because we were both too scared to have it. Sam got there first, taking my hand. ‘I’m falling in love with you again,’ he’d said softly.

  I’d lost the ability to breathe.

  How many life-changing moments were we destined to have? Sam had asked me to marry him years before. I’d said yes, but then left and broke his heart. I’d gone back to find him years later, and that time my heart was shattered by his new career choice. He’d begged me to reconsider, but I couldn’t. I left him again, married Mark.

  Now here we were again. He’d told me he loved me. Asked me to think about trying again. And despite the fact that I wanted him so badly it hurt, I somehow managed to stay on the right side of monogamy. My boys had been asleep in the next room, and I couldn’t betray their father for the sake of an incredible, wanton, wild, fan-fricking-tastic night of passion. No matter how much I wanted to.

  Instead, I told him I had to think about it, had to work out my feelings for Mark.

  A few nights later, back in Sam’s house in LA, I was, very maturely, still avoiding the issue, torn between two men I loved. But which one did I love more?

  Before I had a chance to do anything I’d regret, to cross a line with Sam or to break a vow to my husband, Mark took it out of my hands the next day by arriving unexpectedly. My boys were fairly sure their magic powers had made it happen. It was either that, or the Gods Of Marital Panic, so I let them believe their version.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ I told him, overcome that he’d travelled all this way for us. There was a whole cauldron of other feelings too. Relief, mostly. A bit of shame. And I ignored the tiny tug of regret that any illicit thoughts or feelings for Sam had just been squashed by Mark’s size elevens. No more wondering what if. No more torturing myself over how I felt.

  For the next two weeks, we had the kind of family holiday that makes you wake up happy in the morning and then go to sleep hours later, still smiling. Sam had gone off on location, so the fog of confusion cleared. Mark was the boys’ dad. We were a family. I had no right to break up their lives. More than that, I still loved him. No matter what, when I thought about how the rest of my life would look, Mark was by my side. We’d been brilliant together once, and I knew we could be that way again. Mark promised to meet me halfway. He wasn’t going to work as much. He was going to be more involved with us. We were going to recapture the kind of happiness that I’d experienced with no one else but him.

  When the fortnight came to an end, Mark’s vacation was over and he had to go back to work. I was staying in LA a while longer to fulfil my meetings with the movie companies.

  After he’d gone, I knew it was time to be honest with everyone, including myself.

  One night a couple of weeks later, I found Sam sitting outside on the terrace by the fire and went to him.

  I didn’t even have to speak.

  ‘You’re going back to Mark, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I am.’ I could feel a piece chip right off my heart. I couldn’t be with Sam, but I couldn’t lose him from my life either. ‘Are we over, Sam? Is this it?’ I asked, terrified of the answer.

  He took a sip of his beer and stared into the flames for a moment. ‘Carly, we’ve been through worse than this and survived it. I love you, no matter what. And if that’s as friends, then I’ll take it.’ Man, he was killing me. ‘Besides,’ he went on, a sad smile, ‘I’m Benny’s godfather. I can’t deprive him of my godfatherly brilliance.’

  The chip in my heart got bigger. If it was a movie, the end credits would roll over the footage of me and the boys landing back in London, then rushing through the terminal, the doors opening and ta da! There’s Mark, arms wide, and we rush to him and he wraps us in a loving embrace and we all live happily ever after.

  Only, as we’d already found out, life wasn’t like the movies.

  18

  Los Angeles, 13th August, 2019

  God Is A Woman – Ariana Grande

  ‘You did what? Jesus, I think my womb just clenched,’ I gasped, gripping the phone and praying I’d misheard.

  Mac repeated it, just in case I hadn’t been traumatised enough the first time. ‘We went bungee jumping off a cliff. It was epic, Mum. Although, Benny couldn’t speak for an hour after it. I think his brain was rattled.’

  ‘Your mother is fricking rattled! Tell me that your father isn’t injured.’

  ‘Of course not. Why?’

  ‘Because I want him to get home in one piece so I can kill him.’

  Mac’s throaty laugh made my womb stand down from fear level one. God, I missed them. ‘Dad!’ I heard him shouting. ‘Mum says she’s thrilled we went bungee jumping and we’ve to make sure we have loads more adventures like that on this holiday.’

  ‘Mac Barwick,’ I spat, doing the full name thing of the pissed-off Scottish mother. ‘You are going to be grounded until you’re thirty.’

  I heard the rustle of him removing the phone from his ear. ‘And, Dad,’ he shouted into the distance again, ‘she’s saying we should try skydiving next.’

  ‘Make it forty,’ I threatened, trying to keep the amusement out of my voice. ‘Now let me speak to your brother so I can let him know I’m writing you both out of my Will if there are any more death-defying stunts.’

  Another rustle, and I heard Mac stage-whisper, ‘Don’t tell her about the swimming with sharks.’

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ Benny greeted me with his usual quiet cheeriness.

  ‘Benny Barwick, I love you…’

  ‘I can hear a “but” coming,’ he said wisely.

  ‘But I’m relying on you to be the sensible and mature one there.’

  ‘How does that work? I’m the youngest. I should be the nightmare.’

  He had a point. ‘Yep, but we both know that your brother is an adrenalin junkie, and going by what Mac just told me, your father is clearly on drugs.’

  His chuckles were the equivalent of fluffy unicorns for the soul.

  ‘Now try to come back in one piece because I kinda like you guys the way I made you. Okay?’

  More chuckles. ‘Copy that.’ He must have been watching Chicago Fire again. ‘Anyway, Mac’s shouting that we need to go. Something about getting shot out of a cannon. We’ll call you if we survive. Love you, Mum!’

  And he was gone, leaving me sitting at the kitchen island in a puddle of maternal stress. I tried to shrug it off, telling myself they’d be fine. They would. I’d see them again in just over a week, and in the meantime, I had plenty of people here to keep my mind off missing them.

  It was the morning after Kate and Jess had arrived, and I’d got up early to drink coffee and write my weekly column for Family Values – the kind of magazine that was only read by people who had three nannies, who hothoused their little darlings in cello and Mandarin before they were five, and had a conniption if their child went within ten feet of any food that wasn’t organic. By some miracle, I’d managed to sustain the weekly load of tossed-up bollocks for over a decade. My general formula for writing it was to conjure up the most irritating parental habit or trend I could think of, then write 800 words extolling the virtues of it.

  Thanks to Carol and my experiences on this trip, today’s was easy – an essay on why you should always fly first class (but leave the nanny and the kids in economy). I was 100 per cent sure that at least half the people who read my weekly witterings agreed with me, and the other half would quite happily see me choke on my vanilla soymilk skinny cappuccino with a macadamia twist. I’d once written a whole column on why that should be the coffee of choice for the busy mum who lunched. It was that or yet another piece on the merits of subjecting your baby to classical music and high-b
row literature in the womb.

  I’d just shivered, reminded myself that I only did it for the money, and pressed send when Kate wandered in with Jess and Val, all dressed in trainers and some combination of Lycra or loungewear.

  ‘Where have you lot been?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘Five-mile jog,’ Val fired back, flicking on the kettle.

  That was a shock. The last time I saw Val jogging was vivid in my memory. 13 July 1985, the day of the Live Aid concert, and she was running to get to the off license before it closed, because an impromptu party had kicked off in her house and the adults had run out of beer, Martini and Babycham. She was also trying to cheer up my Uncle Don, because he’d just found out that she’d phoned in and donated their entire summer holiday fund to Bob Geldof.

  ‘Wow, seriously?’ I asked, thinking LA was changing us all.

  Kate crumbled first. ‘No, of course not. We were using the telescope in the back garden to try to spy on the next house along the canyon. Apparently, Matthew McConaughey lives there and he does naked yoga in the mornings.’

  Jess took her shades off and yawned. Her mass of red, Deborah Messing hair was tied up in a messy bun and her ivory skin was even paler than usual.

  ‘You look knackered, Jess. Jet lag kick in?’

  ‘Erm, yeah. Something like that.’

  Kate shot her a knowing look. ‘Jess Latham, you’ll never go to heaven.’

  I took a sip of my coffee, trying to act cool. Jess was the kind of person who shared things in her own time and if she thought she was being interrogated she’d clam up and tell us nothing. It was understandable. She’d absolutely been through the wars in her love life. After the affair with the married MP splashed her across the newspapers and made her a household-name tart (her words, not mine), she really thought she’d turned things round when she married Mike, the journalist who had exposed her affair. Within a few months, she was pregnant and I’d never seen her so contented, so absolutely blissfully happy and it stayed that way until the moment she found out that Mike was shagging around behind her back.

  Distraught, heartbroken, and with a young baby to support, she’d surprised us all by marrying Keith, a lovely builder, and going off to live in France. About ten years ago, Keith dropped dead on a building site. Heart attack at forty-two. It took Jess a long time to even look at another man, but when she did, the occasional one-night stand had been the most she could manage. ‘I’ve been in love three times,’ she used to say. ‘That’s more than enough for any woman. Except Cooper.’ I didn’t take offence.

  The occasional one-night stand had turned into something much more frequent in recent years thanks to dating apps, but Jess was rightly unapologetic. The way she wanted to live her life was her choice, and none of us judged her for it. As long as she was happy, took safety precautions, used condoms and carried pepper spray, we were all for it.

  ‘Something to share, Jess?’ I probed gently. ‘Or will I wait until you’ve gone to the loo and Val tells me everything?’

  ‘Every detail,’ Val agreed, nodding.

  ‘Okay, okay! God, you lot need to learn about boundaries and personal space.’

  I chose not to point out that she was the worst of us when it came to interfering in each other’s lives. ‘I went out last night to meet someone I’d hooked up with online.’

  I almost spluttered my coffee across Sam’s marble island.

  ‘When? We didn’t go to bed until 3 a.m.’

  ‘Eh, yeah. It was about three thirty. I got back at six,’ she admitted, shame-faced, before attempting to use bravado to wiggle out of it. ‘I’ve had about an hour’s sleep, I’m close to the edge, and jurors now consider sleep deprivation as a solid base of defence in murder trials, so it’s probably wise if you lot stop meddling in my business.’

  That made me laugh. ‘You do you, boo. I’m fully supportive of your decisions regarding your own lady garden.’

  ‘Aye, but does she have to have so many gardeners?’ Val quipped.

  Thankfully, Carol and Toni chose that moment to appear, both of them in pyjama shorts and vest tops, make-up free, with their hair pulled up in high ponytails.

  I pulled a move out of Toni’s playbook, sighed and rolled my eyes. ‘If I rolled out of bed like that, I’d spend the first hour of the day walking up and down the street so all my neighbours could see me.’

  Carol came over and hugged me from behind. ‘Ah, but you’re beautiful on the inside,’ she teased. ‘Under this gorgeous exterior, I’m completely shallow and a bit of a cow.’

  Kate rattled up four mugs on to the worktop – Val already had tea and Toni wasn’t a fan of hot drinks in the morning – and poured coffee from the pot that was on a machine that looked like it could power a space shuttle.

  ‘What’s our plan for today then?’ I asked. ‘Anyone got anything they want to do?’

  I could have been staring into an eclipse, and I’d still have spotted all the shifty glances that passed between them.

  Suspicion made my voice drop a couple of notes. ‘What’s going on? What am I missing?’

  ‘Okay, hear us out,’ Kate pleaded.

  If they were making Kate do the talking it must be bad. They knew that she was the one most likely to win me over because I couldn’t refuse her anything. She knew too much.

  ‘Carol has been invited to cover the launch of a new laptop for one of her clients. It’s a big swanky do and would be great for her to be there,’ Kate began, her tone and body language not necessarily matching such a positive announcement.

  ‘O-kayyyyy,’ I said, slightly suspicious.

  Carol took up the reins. ‘It’s a big earner, and I’d be crazy not to do it. Especially since it’s over here.’

  Even better! So what was the problem?

  ‘And they’ve said that they’ll pay my travel and I can bring guests. They’ll pay for them too.’

  I was already trying to work out what I had in my case that I could wear to a fancy launch. Another trip to the Grove might be on the cards, unless Estelle had a designer frock that was really stretchy.

  ‘That sounds amazing!’ I enthused, to more shifty glances. Even Val was staring into her tea.

  ‘When she says “over here”, she doesn’t exactly mean Los Angeles,’ Jess explained and, oh God, she was physically squirming. Jess hadn’t squirmed since she’d had a chlamydia false alarm that gave her psychosomatic symptoms.

  ‘So where is it?

  As I raised my coffee, Kate’s eyes met mine, and I saw the apprehension in the furrow of her brow.

  ‘New York,’ she said quietly.

  I knew my cup was burning my lips, but I couldn’t move it. It took me several seconds of stunned silence before my trembling hands could slowly, carefully return it to the table.

  ‘No,’ I said, quietly, definitely, shocked that they would even suggest it. I wasn’t going back to New York. No way. I couldn’t do it. They knew how I felt about it, so why would they do this to me? How could they think it was something I’d even consider? Were they crazy?

  ‘Hear us out, Carly, please,’ Kate begged, and my suspicions rose even further until I was in full-scale conspiracy mode. Was there even a launch? Had this been planned all along? Was this some kind of fucked-up ploy that they’d all been in on?

  She mistook my furious silence for the green light to go on.

  ‘It’s time. We should do this.’ A pause. ‘You need to do this.’

  ‘No. No, I don’t. Did you lot plan this all along?’

  I could see Carol was genuinely surprised by this, so I scored that accusation off my list, while she argued the point.

  ‘No! I swear. But, okay, I did call and offer to do the job this morning because I realised it made sense.’

  ‘How does it make sense?’ My voice rose just as Arnie walked in the door, read the room, then promptly turned and walked out again.

  ‘Because you’ll never get past this if you don’t face it,’ Jess said impatiently. She’d never b
een great at sympathy or emotional turmoil and I could see by her irritation that I’d already passed her tolerance point. ‘And because we’ve already told Hannah and Ryan that we’re coming.’

  The explosion in my chest was so violent that I almost buckled with the pain. How could they? These were the people I loved more than anyone and they were backing me into a corner of pain. Hannah and Ryan. Sarah’s children, kids we’d loved since they were little and who were now grown adults with their own lives. Lives that were being lived without a mother, because Sarah was dead, and so was her husband, Nick, both killed by all the decisions that had led to her being in the wrong place at the wrong time. My decisions.

  ‘And Hannah was okay with us coming?’ I asked. Last year, we’d thought about making the trip to New York – the first time we’d have been there since Sarah’s funeral the year before – but Hannah had said she was too busy at work. I didn’t believe her. She didn’t want us there. And I knew why. She didn’t want to see me. She’d never actually vocalised it, but I knew, because I’d feel the same. It was easy to keep up polite conversation in our calls and texts, but actually seeing someone, being with them, was a whole different level of pretence and I knew that Hannah didn’t feel ready for it. I didn’t blame her. The truth was I had been relieved because I couldn’t bring myself to face her either.

  ‘Yes! She wants us to come. All of us!’ Jess assured me. I didn’t believe her.

  ‘Come with us,’ Kate begged. ‘It’s only for a couple of days and then we’ll be back here and I know you’ll feel so much better.’

  I slowly stood up, shook my head. ‘No.’

  None of them said a word as I walked right past them and out of the door.

  * * *

  I’ve no idea how long I’d been staring at the ceiling when there was a knock at my bedroom door. I had a hunch it would be Val. She would have been my first choice of negotiator in any situation that called for serious mediation.

  ‘Can I come in?’